by John Farris
Hecuba took two quick steps and with the stealth of a pick-pocket reached deep inside Willem's unbuttoned shirt. She deposited the snake in a loose pouch of silken material, inches from his liver.
Willem dropped the African house snake and straightened with a snort of surprise and fear as Lady Hecuba stepped nimbly back out of his reach. His little eyes widened as he felt the body of the wormlike snake against his flesh. His hand jumped to the opening of his shirt.
"NO!" Hecuba said. "Don't make any abrupt moves. Do nothing to startle him. He is a little sluggish from having been kept a degree or two colder than he likes. But he will soon warm up from your body heat. Then he will be unpredictable."
"What is it?" Willem said in a strangled voice.
"A coral snake. Highly venomous but not unusually disagreeable. As long as you are very careful you may coexist with him indefinitely. But if you try to remove him, unless you have exceptional nerves you will undoubtedly botch the job. That means death."
She saw, in his eyes, the momentary urge to kill her that was almost stronger than his fear of the lethal nudging coldness. His sweat had begun to run in streams. Hecuba smiled, thinking that a muscle might soon begin to twitch uncontrollably and attract the reprimanding sting.
Then she heard Nyshuri crying for her outside the villa, a desperate, wounded cry.
She had wrecked the Toyota, almost within sight of Villa Bib-Shala. Run off the road by a grimy hooting tanker coming around a stalled vehicle abandoned in the southbound lane, the car had caromed and smashed its way down a slope paved with a jumble of rocks strewn there during construction of the highway. Everything from a front wheel to the oil pan, the transmission, and the tailpipe assembly was ripped away, but the Toyota didn't roll over, nor did it meet a rock big enough to punch the engine back into the passenger compartment. The gas tank remained intact, but there wasn't enough gas left to consume the wreck even if it had caught fire.
Nyshuri sat perfectly still for thirty seconds, bruised and shaken, a death grip on the wheel, staring at a wedge of blue sea visible through one side of the smashed windshield.
The door on her side grated open. She felt a hand on her shoulder.
"How badly are you hurt?" she was asked in English.
Nyshuri turned her battered face slowly to Michael Belov. Her vision was blurred; she ought to have recognized him, but saw only that he was nicely dressed, deeply tanned, from his manner a man of substance, perhaps a diplomat.
He seemed truly concerned. She tried to answer him, but no words came out.
"Your car's a total loss, I'm afraid. Where are you going? Can I take you?" He touched her face Despite the angle of the late afternoon sun her skin was cold, dotted with pinpoints of perspiration. Then his hands were all over her, feeling her bones, pressing gently into the muscled areas of her stomach and abdomen.
"Does that hurt? Here? Good. Listen to me. You've had a narrow escape. I don't think your injuries are too serious, but there's a danger of shock reaction. I want you to come with me."
Nyshuri licked her lips. "No. My . . . friend's house. Expecting me."
"Where?"
She nodded fractionally toward a fingerlike oasis of trees between the blazing land and the foaming edge of the sea three hundred yards distant "Just there."
"I'll take you."
"Thank you. Kind."
Belov reached around Nyshuri to get a hand under her arm so he could help her out of the car. Her head drooped. Looking down, she saw the pistol tucked into his waistband beneath his striped jacket. She was turning numb, and felt colder still.
"No..."
"Don't worry. The trick is to get moving. Lean against me. Have a go at it. There . .
"W-who . . . are you?"
"Your friend. Don't talk. Conserve your strength. Breathe deeply if you can."
They left the wreck behind. She was a big girl and she wore platform shoes, which were of no use in negotiating the rocky downslope. For the better part of the way he had to haul her along, her head nodding vertiginously against his shoulder. But when they reached a narrow track winding through groves to the wall of Hecuba's villa, she seemed slowly to come around.
"I know you," Nyshuri said suddenly.
"Do you?"
"Saw you . . . with Robeson." She had begun to walk by herself in the shallow sand, but she still held on to his arm, breathing rapidly, filled with tremors.
"That's right. I was there this morning."
"Are you his friend?"
'Tm a journalist."
"My friend–has sworn that she will kill him for what he did to me."
"Nyshuri–is your head clear now?"
"Better," she mumbled.
"It was really Henry Landreth I came to see this morning. But he was gone. Can you tell me where?"
She stopped near the gate and made a half turn, unsteadily.
"Straight to hell, when Robeson catches up with him. I don't care. I always hated being with him. His white skin, like worms in spoiled meat. I only want Hecuba. I will never leave her now."
Nyshuri ran, a hand on the wall to guide her, and tottered through the gates to the villa.
"Hecuba, Hecuba, help me!"
She was halfway to the house when Lady Hecuba appeared on her third-floor terrace.
"Nyshuri, get away from here. Run!"
Nyshuri stopped. Her brain simply refused to work anymore. She looked back at Belov, then again at Hecuba, who seemed no longer to be her friend. Nyshuri threw up her hands, wailing.
Jan-Nic Pretorius came outside on the verandah with a gun in his hand, one of the old reliable PPKs.
Belov drew his own weapon and slipped up close to Nyshuri, putting her between Pretorius and himself. There was no other suitable cover in the spacious yard. The sun was sinking low in the trees beyond the wall, random patterns of light and shade splashed across the pink facade of the house. Nyshuri, clutching her head, started to one side, then zagged the other way as Belov shadow-dodged along with her. Pretorius dropped down on one knee trying to draw a bead on Belov that wouldn't also include Nyshuri.
Belov said in John Wayne's familiar voice, "Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.'"
In Lady Hecuba's boudoir Willem screamed, so high on the scale he sounded like a woman.
"'Jan-Nic! Jan-Nic!" he cried, more recognizably. "God in Heaven, I'm a dead man!"
Jan-Nic, unnerved, allowed his gun hand to waver. In Afrikaans he shouted back, "Willem! What's wrong, man? I need your help!"
As Hecuba turned around on the terrace, Willem rushed out and lifted her high. Her own scream ended abruptly as she smashed down headfirst onto the verandah wall, overturning a stone urn planted with oleanders.
Belov dived into the grass, clamped a hand on Nyshuri's ankle and spilled her flat in front of him. He let off a rip of bullets from the Skorpion, elbow braced against the ground.
Enough of the bullets hit Jan-Nic to kill him.
Belov got up quickly, his eyes on Willem. The snake-bit man was staring down at the ruins of Lady Hecuba ha-Levi de Quattro-Smythe, his head lowered, his chest heaving. He began to shudder and buck as if a horse were kicking him. His eyes were unfocused. Belov, taking no chances that it was an act of some kind, raised the Skorpion and emptied the magazine in Willem's face.
Keeping low, Belov ran up to the verandah and looked into Jan-Nic's untouched face. But his throat was shattered. Around his neck he wore, on a gold chain, a medallion locket. Belov, strangely, wanted to open it. But he was afraid of what he might see: a glimpse of a life before death. The faces of children.
There was still a stink of battle on the warm air. He helped himself to Jan-Nic's Walther. There had been shouting, screams, gunfire, over in a few moments. How many others might be around? Where were the servants Hecuba needed to run a house this size? He stayed with his back pressed against the wall beside the high carved ebony front doors, listening, watching.
Nyshuri crawled to the edge of the verandah and pulled the l
oose body of her lover down into her lap, commenced lamentations in a musical, clicking tribal tongue.
Belov decided to make a move before she was too far gone in grief. He went to Nyshuri and crouched low beside her, where he could watch both the house and the road leading up to the gates.
"Nyshuri!" He had to shake her to get her to lift her head and regard him with a red-veined eye.
"Robeson Kumenyere is to blame for this," he said.
She agreed with him, nodding ecstatically. She started on another low moan of mourning. Belov cut her off by slapping her hard where her face was most tender.
"Listen. I will go after him and kill him for you. Is that what you want?"
"Yes . . . yes."
"Tell me where he's gone."
"To the big mountain. To Kilimanjaro. After Henry."
"Where on the mountain?"
"Nyangoro . . . Coffee Cooperative." She raised bloody hands and smeared her face. "Oh, my Hecuba! My life is gone."
"Kilimanjaro.. You're certain of that."
She looked down at Hecuba's grossly misshapen head, a spilled jelly eye. She nodded.
"Thank you," Belov said to Nyshuri. "I'll keep my pledge to you."
He stood. He stepped behind her. He put the muzzle of the Walther close to the brain stem at the base of her skull, and pulled the trigger.
The road to the nationalized coffee-growing plantation on the southern slope of Kilimanjaro was a ribbon of broken bitumen that ran through irrigated acres of fruit trees and vegetable gardens, plots of grass where cattle still grazed despite the declared emergency. The orange corrugated metal roofs of the coop buildings, surrounded by thousands of Arabica coffee bushes, were close to the fringe of the montane forest belt, the beginning of Kilimanjaro National Park and game reserve.
Because of the threatening weather surrounding the mountain, it was nearly dark when the Land-Rover driven by Sergeant Kivinje bumped across a cattle guard and entered the Nyangoro Cooperative. There appeared to be no one around, but the helicopter Henry Landreth had observed earlier was parked near a long storage shed. Now the property of the Tanzanian People's Defense Force Air Wing, it was an old U. S. Army Raven with a Perspex pod jutting forward from the fuselage.
Kivinje slowed to make the right-angle turn to the lodge. Another quake jarred the ground beneath them. It was over in a few seconds, but it left Henry with a lingering uneasiness. He pondered the darkness of the lodge, the presence of the old helicopter. He had misgivings that refused to take any definite shape. Impulsively he reached out to Sergeant Kivinje.
"I've changed my mind. I won't stop here after all. Up ahead is the track to the nine-thousand-foot level. It's suitable for four-wheel-drive vehicles. We can make it to the climbing hut there in a couple of hours."
"But you have no food! No warm clothes. Very bitter at night on the mountain."
"I'm bloody well aware of that. We had one of our camps a little farther up, on the moorland. No one takes that route to Kibo–it's too difficult for inexperienced climbers. Our caches of food and clothing should still be there."
Sergeant Kivinje had the Rover down to a crawl. He looked anxious.
"Not much petrol, sir."
"Oh, very well. Pull over to the pump there by the garage. But be quick."
Henry brooded in the front seat while the sergeant cranked the pump, which someone had forgotten to lock, and inserted the nozzle into the Rover's gas tank. The liters rang off. A flash of red appeared on the dirty windshield and trembled there, then steadied to a hot perfect circle about the size of a shirt button. It crept slowly in Henry's direction. He stared, entranced, wondering what the light could be, what the source was.
The light was just at the outside of his reflection on the glass when the windshield began to fly into fragents, chewed up by a short burst of .22-caliber bullets. Bits of glass were dashed in his face; he heard one of the slugs ricochet off the steel handgrip of the seat behind him.
Henry let out a howl of dismay and jumped into the driver's seat, banging a bare knee on the gearshift knob. He turned the ignition key, saw another spot of red light traveling across the webbed glass, ducked, threw the Rover into gear, and pulled away, leaving Sergeant Kivinje hosing gas into the dirt.
No new holes appeared in the windshield. One appeared instead in Sergeant Kivinje's chin as he lifted his head in surprise to see where Henry was going.
The impact of the lightweight bullet caused his head and torso to jerk back three or four inches. The bullet went down through his throat and tore the jugular vein. As Henry glanced back, he saw a stream of blood pumping in a corollary arc to the wasted gasoline. Kivinje collapsed slowly, his eyes like yellow fog, releasing his grip on the handle of the nozzle.
Bullets began to pierce the Land-Rover. Henry made a sliding panic turn to the left, then another, sharp right turn to avoid an area of piled-up brush and small trees ready for burning, and almost ended, wheels up, in a drainage ditch. The rear tires spun on a rain-softened embankment and bit deep, catapulted him forward as the windshield took another hit. He lost his hat and his bearings trying to crank the steering wheel from below the level of the dashboard, but in truth there was no place to hide: The big grayish-green Rover was an easy, flimsy target.
An open gate appeared and he barged through it, banging one side of the vehicle hard against an iron post; then he was traveling uphill through shrub country, the Rover blending in the rainy dusk with the color of the tidy, uniform coffee trees. Nothing lay ahead but a wide thick forest half smothered in ground fog. He heard no more bullets plinking metal. Sobbing from relief, Henry floored the accelerator and straightened himself behind the wheel. Nothing was blocking the track ahead. Soon it would be dark and not even the helicopter, if they dared to send it up, would be able to find him within the tall trees, unless they had heat-sensing equipment aboard, or night sights for their weapons. The latter might be a possibility; he realized now it was a laser beam that had sought him as he sat waiting for the gas tank to be filled. A new and terrifying adjunct to the sniper's art.
But who were they, and why did they want to kill him? He was still mindlessly in flight, too rattled to think it through, to accept the obvious answer: Robeson Kumenyere had decided to do away with his coconspirator. At the moment nothing mattered but the nearness of sanctuary. A few hundred yards more. The plantation was well behind him, the big trees were springing up left and right, a deepening tangle of bramble defined the track. Some bush pigs fled from the sound of the Rover bearing down on them. A bend in the track, a wall of fog, he had to use his lights. Safe at last.
The Rover's engine, however, had begun to sing some wrong notes. It was developing what might prove to be a fatal cough. The odor of escaping motor oil was sharp in the windless air.
In the lodge of the Nyangoro Coffee Cooperative, where the lights had been turned on, Robeson Kumenyere cleaned his new rifle meticulously before packing the components away in the presentation case.
"When you have the part you need, how long will it take you to repair the helicopter?" he asked the pilot who had flown him to Kilimanjaro from the airport in Dar es Salaam.
"Three hours, I should think, sir."
"Then you'll-,be ready to leave tomorrow afternoon."
"Yes, sir."
"Good. I'll be back by then."
"Going up the mountain now, sir?" the pilot asked incredulously.
"Of course not. Let Henry spend the night in the forest alone. He's ill equipped for the adventure. Of course he won't sleep a wink, he'll be afraid to doze off and risk a surprise. By morning he'll be nothing but a mass of exposed nerve endings." Kumenyere yawned and stretched his big frame. "Let's give the poor bugger I shot a proper burial, then see what's for supper in this place."
Chapter 23
KILIMANJARO
Makari Mountains, Tanzania
May 19
A Cessna Skylane belonging to a company owned by Akim Koshar, the spice merchant and Soviet agent, left Zan
zibar at seven thirty in the morning, flew due north and low about ten miles off the coastline of Tanzania, crossing the Pemba Channel. They raised the mangrove-dotted coast of Kenya fifty-nine minutes later and the pilot made a course correction that would take them over the southern dogleg of Tsavo National Park and then to the Kenya side, the northern slopes, of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Michael Belov rode in the right-hand seat of the Cessna. He had brought with him gear sufficient for a week's stay on Kilimanjaro in the rarefied atmosphere above fourteen thousand feet. He was also carrying two Polaroid cameras, a dozen film packs, and a lightweight machine that was capable of rapid transmission of the developed prints to a third-generation Molniya ("Lightning") satellite in a highly elliptical, inclined orbit above the earth. The satellite made a twice-daily run down the African continent from the Nile Delta to Cape St. Francis, reaching a perigee of 310 miles very near the equator and only 37 minutes of latitude from Kilimanjaro. He could quickly let his superiors know what, if anything, they would find in the Catacombs.
Midmorning the pilot circled to avoid a flock of buzzards, the greatest hazard to small planes in the airspace over bush Africa, and set the Cessna down on an unlicensed landing ground south of the Tsavo River. They were within a few miles of the invisible, unpoliced border, on a windy burned-up plain. There was high cloud cover on Kilimanjaro.
A bearded full-bellied man named McVickers, an old Africa hand, was waiting for Belov with a Toyota Land Cruiser station wagon. McVickers helped Belov transfer his backpack from the aircraft.
"Couldn't return home without climbing the mountain, eh?"
"Because it's there," Belov explained with utmost seriousness.
"Why the Nyangoro approach to Kibo?"
"It's highly touted."
"Aye, but difficult. At the best of times." McVickers had been looking over the alpine equipment which Akim Koshar had secured for Belov on short notice. "Looks like you know what you're doing. Wouldn't set foot up there myself now. Kibo's got the shakes. She's too hot." He offered a tin of snuff, which Belov declined. "Well, let's hump it, shall we? No roads the way we're going."